OK, Now What?

Democratic Party strategists believed Joe Biden was supposed to be winning at this point. Well...

(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Two months ago, President Biden quieted panicky liberals and narrative-hungry political journalists by delivering a vigorous (and thus successful) State of the Union address. 

As the writer Kevin Drum noted last week, interest in Biden’s age as measured by Google search data instantly collapsed. Biden effectively settled the argument over his fitness to mount a strong candidacy. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein added a big asterisk to a lengthy essay he’d published just days earlier encouraging Biden to retire. 

The studiously non-panicky Democratic strategist

Simon Rosenberg

went one step further: Not only had the panic been unfounded, but with the State of the Union address and primary season both behind us, the seeds of a comeback were ready to sprout. The Democratic base would begin to reconsolidate, Trump’s status as the Republican nominee would cease to be a matter of any speculation, and Biden—without growing one day younger or more youthful—would quickly take the lead. He even offered a specific timeline. 

“We’re really at the very beginning of the election,” he told New Republic podcaster Greg Sargent, “and we’re going to know a lot more about this election by late April or early May. My view…is that what’s the likely scenario at this point is that Biden’s up by two-three points by late April or early May as the Democratic coalition begins to come home. And then we’ve got to campaign to go get the rest. And hopefully even go beyond what we did in 2020 and win the election by an even bigger margin than we did last time.”

I appreciated this specificity. And in part because the theory made a lot of intuitive sense, it served in my mind as a timeline for gauging the need to consider drastic measures. The debate over Biden’s candidacy had raged when we were stuck betwixt and between. There may have been a logic to mounting a primary challenge against a weak incumbent, but a campaign like that would’ve had to begin about a year ago. There may also be an argument for a weak candidate to step aside in favor of an alternate ticket, but you’d want him to make that decision much closer to the convention. After all, as Rosenberg noted, March was the very beginning. Who quits when they’re down just two points early, even if they were favored to win at the outset?

For a few weeks, Rosenberg’s forecast was looking very prescient. Biden’s numbers began to climb. In some models he took a tiny lead. But then his progress stalled. In most averages, he still trails, to say nothing of enjoying a two- or three-point lead with favorables trending in the right direction. 

The doubters are thus starting to rekindle their doubts. “Ezra Klein was right,” wrote

Peter Beinart

, “it’s still not too late.” If an optimistic scenario painted by a party strategist like Rosenberg doesn’t come to pass, the thinking goes, Biden must be in real trouble. 

That is how I feel—I don’t share Beinart’s certitude, but I do think it will soon be time to revive the alternate-ticket conversation in some form. Back in March I wrote of Rosenberg’s prediction, “If it doesn’t come to pass… the case for pressing Biden to step aside and endorse an alternate ticket will become very strong, and I’ll be out there making it.”

This piece has thus been on my calendar for mid-May ever since. And as of last week, I’d outlined it in my head just like that: Spring is almost over, Biden’s still losing, it’s time to broach this topic once again, without necessarily rooting it in ancillary concerns about his age. His weak standing has persisted even as his age has receded as an issue. We should simply ask whether he’s outmatched—too baggage-laden to carry all of American democracy on his shoulders.

I still think we might get there, but 1) as Rosenberg told me on Thursday, the race is still very close—closer than it was two months ago, and much too close to abruptly decapitate the top of the ticket, and; 2) just this week Biden made a pretty strong, implicit case for giving it another month before reassessing: He challenged Trump to a late-June debate, on his terms, and Trump impulsively accepted. Assuming Trump doesn’t pull out just as impulsively, that will obviously be a high-stakes and revelatory moment—more so than even the State of the Union address. But delivering the challenge was in and of itself a promising sign—that his campaign realizes it must wrestle with Republicans to shape the public’s understanding of this election, and not simply respond to their provocations.

Biden, his campaign, and the entire Democratic Party have a terrible allergy to making big, theatrical, newsy moments. It was in the stifling languor of Democratic antipolitics that Biden’s comeback stalled. If the campaign recognizes that—if the debate challenge marks the beginning of a new, more consistent offensive—Biden’s comeback may begin again, and this time it might last. 

IF IT’S NOT BROKERED…

I’ll explain what that might look like below. Let me first make the case that making the case for a late candidate swap is not inherently crazy. (A metacase?)

The way I saw it then and still see it: Those who are certain Biden should yield and those who insist he never should are each, to some degree, not being fully candid with themselves. With respect to panicky liberals, their critics are correct about this much: Nobody knows with any certainty what would happen if Biden agreed to step aside. It’s a truly nuclear option, not a decision anyone should make early or lightly or when viable ideas to improve his numbers remain untested.

But these critics are similarly too categorical.

Aaron Fritschner, one of the sharper Democratic aides on Capitol Hill, argues that the alternate-ticket argument can not be embraced rationally. It’s merely grist for cheap-seaters who crave drama or false comfort for the weak-kneed—in either case, an elaborate fantasy scenario that cannot and will not come to pass.

But this can’t be right as a rule.

There's obviously a level of underperformance that would make resolute Biden supporters admit he’s not the ideal candidate. What if Democrats mount a new offensive, try a bunch of different things to upend the race, and they all fail? What if Trump opens up a three point lead? Five points? If Biden were down by an unbeatable margin on the eve of the convention, would all of his ride-or-die supporters really have full confidence that he should remain the nominee?

Biden’s saving grace (but also the thing that makes his candidacy so fraught with potential regret) is that he's losing, but in a winnable contest. Every sports fan understands this. Just a couple weeks ago I watched from the cheap seats (where else?) as the Washington Nationals staged a bottom-of-the-ninth comeback when they’d been losing the game by a run or two most of the way through. I grew up a Dodger’s fan in southern California. I know all about leaving the ballpark in the seventh or eighth inning to beat traffic if a game isn’t close. I stuck around til the end this time because it was winnable. The election is, too! But if Biden botches a debate so badly that he sinks several points, then it won’t just be attention-seeking pundits racing for the exits. 

And survey data suggests that they might find safe harbor on the other side. The latest New York Times/Siena poll rattled the Democratic elite (as it almost always does) because it showed Biden getting trounced in the sun-belt states he won four years ago (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada). Viewed another way, it also showed him within a point or so of sweeping the Blue Wall rust-belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which would be enough to hand him a narrow re-election. But what it showed indisputably is that the statewide Democratic officeholders in all of the swing states are much more popular than he is. Any one of them picked at random might be a safer bet than Biden to top the ticket, if he starts spending down his war chest and remains poised for defeat. 

ROSEN’ COLORED GLASSES

So to restate the headline question: What now?

Rosenberg’s view (which you can read at length here) is little changed from March: Polling trends and structural advantages still favor Biden, even if he missed the late April/early May benchmark. “It’s playing out exactly like I argued it would play out,” Rosenberg said, “just maybe not on the exact timeline.” He acknowledged that the Biden campaign (though also the Trump campaign) “can’t be satisfied with where they are, and they’ve got to keep working,” but that he’d rather be in Biden’s shoes—with a big money advantage, a real campaign infrastructure, and room to grow—than in Trump’s, with a narrow lead and none of those things.

I think the answer is that Biden and his campaign, along with the rest of the party, need to seize more opportunities. They can’t make the State of the Union address a monthly event, and they can’t pose new debate challenges to Trump every time they start to lose hold of the narrative. But they can make themselves visible. 

It would be wrong and lazy to suggest Biden’s been a torpid campaigner since March. But until this week, it would have been fair to say he’s been pretty conventional. His edgiest move was to tout a big Microsoft facility opening in the same part of Wisconsin where Trump’s promise of a Foxconn jobs bonanza turned out to be vaporware. Biden and his advisers wanted this race to be winnable on the strength of conventional leadership: Get swing voters in swing states good jobs and win the election without much drama. 

He delivered those jobs as planned. That may be why he’s doing much better in the upper midwest than further south. But on its own it’s clearly not enough. 

Biden can and should pull more policy levers that help his cause. He directed the Justice Department to reschedule marijuana, and he of course continues to press for a diplomatic resolution to Israel’s war in Gaza. Those kinds of steps—things that galvanize Democratic voters or heal divisions between them—should help. But policy appeals are often limited by a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately problem. Biden saw his approval rating with young voters climb after he announced his big student-loan forgiveness plan in 2022, but they fell back again even before the Supreme Court voided the program. Long before Israel began bombing Gaza, young voters proved entirely indifferent to the hundreds of billions of dollars in both student-loan forgiveness and climate spending that Biden delivered successfully. 

Beyond policy, then, Biden really, really needs to get conversations started, and on favorable terms. I won’t recite here all the ways I think Democrats could (but almost never do) shape the snippets of media that form the national conversation. You can check out the archive for that. But if I were the Biden campaign, I’d be furious with Senate Democrats for missing every opportunity to expose Republican corruption. If I were Biden himself, I’d be angling to expose what I could on my own. I’d lift my vow of silence over Trump’s legal jeopardy. Behind the scenes I’d encourage civil disobedience over Trump’s abortion bans; in front of the world I’d look for opportunities to help women and families trapped by these bans in very public ways. Need a flight to safety aboard Air Force One? We’re on the way.

I’d make it someone’s job, both on the campaign and in the White House, to keep a daily-updated menu of free-media ideas that I and my surrogates could execute quickly, so that the overwhelming majority of information people were hearing about me wasn’t coming from Donald Trump and his army of propagandists.

With that kind of cadence, I think Rosenberg’s March prediction would’ve borne out exactly as he presented it. Between now and the first debate, it still can—just six weeks behind schedule.